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Europeana’s Music Collections

The main goal for the Europeana Sounds project is to make more audio recordings and audio related content available through the Europeana Portal. Since a lot of those sounds and their related content is connected to or in itself music and therefore plays a very big role in the project. Music is also very important for the Austrian National Library as a project partner, because all of the content the Austrian National Library is providing within Europeana Sounds is music related. (You can read more about our content in one of our former Blog Posts https://onbresearch.wordpress.com/2014/08/ and you can browse through this content on Europeana. http://bit.ly/1OdqGYs)

The Europeana landing page provides a simple search entry to all files which are available within Europeana, but this is not necessarily an ideal start for a thematic research. If you particularly wished to find something music related, you needed to specifically type in certain key words. To make things easier the idea for thematic channels was born. On account of the development of this idea the Europeana portal has been updated, improved and renamed into “Europeana Collections” a couple of month ago. The name stands for the new idea that is behind the Europeana Page. The search entry to all of Europeana’s content remains, but it is planned to have a lot of different thematic collections featured on it, with specific search entry points to highlight certain objects, subthemes or to inspire a different “search behaviour”.

The Music Collections page contains music recordings, sheet music, autographs and correspondence of various composers and every other content which is related to music and is online on Europeana. So you will not only be able to find just the items provided within the Europeana Sounds Project, but every other object within Europeana that is related to music as well.

The very first version of the Music Collections – the Alpha version (formerly called “Music Channel”) – was launched at the beginning of August 2015 and was thoroughly tested until January 2016, improved and is now fully functional in its Beta version.

Data providers of Europeana Sounds will take over the task of curating the Music Collections page for a month each. So around every 30 days you will find new hero images, different search entry points, new blog posts and other things as different institutions start curating. Currently the Bibliothèque nationale de France is holding the curatorship and the Austrian National library will take over in October. So stay tuned until then.

Within the Europeana DSI-2 project, which kicked off a couple of weeks ago, the thematic collections will be developed even further.